Paying students for grades: Is it sustainable and should it be?

This paper highlights some of the most notable cash incentive programs, questions why the flow of money into these programs is not totally transparent and well known to the taxpayers who fund some of them, and reviews literature on the psychological, motivational, and ethical issues surrounding this policy. We would like to question how much public funding is being spent, especially since towns and school systems are struggling in these difficult financial times with miniscule operating budgets

Improving the Lives of Transgender Older Adults: Recommendations for Policy and Practice

Transgender and gender non-conforming adults face a myriad of challenges as they age. While very limited, the existing research on transgender people paints a picture of many people aging in isolation and without a network of knowledgeable or welcoming providers in the aging, health and social services arenas. Further, transgender elders often experience extreme disparities in access to health care and low rates of health insurance coverage due in large part to systemic discrimination from providers and insurance companies, as well as economic instability resulting from discrimination in employment and housing, among other areas. An overarching challenge for policymakersand practitioners isthe dearth in research examining the challenges facing this population--and the types of policies and programmatic interventions that would improve their lives. While the need for better data and more research on lesbian, gay and bisexual communities has gained support over the last few years, gender identity remains largely absent from the scope of social research and analysis. Moreover, few studies have addressed the specific challenges facing transgender elders. Research focused on transgender people of color is even more limited, despite some studies suggesting that they experience high levels of violence and discrimination

Changing the Order of Mathematics Test Items: Helping or Hindering Student Performance?

This paper recounts an experiment by a mathematics professor who primarily teaches mathematics majors. The main question explored is whether the ordering of the questions makes a difference as to how students perform in a test. More specifically we focus here on the following research questions:\ (1) Does arranging a math test with easy-to-hard items versus hard-to-easy items impact student performance? and (2) If so, does item order impact male and female mathematics majors and non-majors in unique ways? We examine data collected over multiple semesters with several different classes. We find that for most of the mathematics students who were examined, the ordering of the questions on a test did not impact performance. However, female majors performed better on classroom exams when the test was arranged with the more difficult questions presented first. Readers who are interested in teaching mathematics, educational psychology, or gender issues in the classroom may find our results intriguing

What prevents universities from ‘building back better’? Fault lines in university structures of care during the COVID-19 pandemic

Universities may have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we argue there are still important lessons to be learnt from that experience of coping. In this paper, we explore whether universities could improve what they do, rather than just returning to pre-lockdown ways of working. We do this by analyzing a series of interviews with staff, recorded during the lockdown in the UK, using Tronto’s political theory of care. This analysis does not suggest that universities simply need to be more caring; it shows, instead, that they were already full of complex and overlapping caring activities. What staff accounts highlighted, however, were the fault lines between responsibilities for academic work and the tasks of caring; the competing priorities staff faced, between work, home and self; and how the burden of caring work was (and still is) unfairly distributed, with consequences for the wellbeing of staff. We conclude by suggesting that better-integrated caring practices are needed, and that developing these will require paying attention to the labour it takes to sustain academic work, and taking responsibility for helping the often-overlooked people who do this

A vocabulary for the configuration of net tows for collecting plankton and micronekton

Collection of zooplankton is done using a wide array of instrumentation. To ensure the long-term value of zooplankton data, metadata about what the data are and when, where, and how the data were collected, plus the use of a domain-specific, controlled vocabulary is essential. It is especially important to use a controlled “deployment” vocabulary when plankton nets are used to collect data, and here we present a vocabulary of net deployment terms

Teaching with technology needs care

Digital learning doesn't have to mean that students aren't going to feel cared for, according to research from Allison Littlejohn, Eileen Kennedy, Diana Laurillard, and Kathy Armour